Call me gullible or impressionable, but I'm actually feeling kind of hopeful this week. It's not just the new year or the inauguration (which I loved most for its goofs and gaffes) or even that—please, please—publishing business firings are coming to an end, at least for a while.
Then again, maybe I am buoyed by the start of the Obama presidency: While I know change is going to be slow in coming, it's energizing to look at what we've already started, at what we can do now.
For example, last week we launched a new feature on Publishersweekly.com. Developed from an idea a brilliant friend from San Francisco threw out at a dinner party in August, we came up with Review It Yourself, a place on our Web site for the reading public to review and rate self-published books and for traditional publishers to check out what's happening in the ever-growing self-publishing world. These are not the gold-standard PW reviews, but a chance for consumers and publishers alike to see if and how they can learn from self-published titles. (Note: Every once in a while a self-published title “crosses over.” See last year's The Lace Reader, a bestseller for Morrow, which started life self-published.)
We've got some other new things going on, too—like art director Clive Chiu's subtle and smart new cover design for our print magazine. And Lynn Andriani's already wildly popular e-newsletter, Cooking the Books. We've also moved our biweekly author profile to the Web exclusively—the better to say what we need to, unlimited by word or page count. (Check out the inaugural one on the divine Zoe Heller (www.publishersweekly.com/heller), profiled by yours truly.
In other words, while everything suggests that the road ahead is going to be rocky, like many others in BookLand, we're still on our feet—and moving forward—because we're still passionate about what we do. We're real readers, we care, and even though many of us have spent our lives swimming around in the publishing pond, we still get excited at the sight of a mail delivery that contains padded envelopes filled with books. And publishing is all about passion: in the people that make books and the people who will still, always, continue to read them. I spent last weekend enthralled by a Coffee House Press novel called Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. I didn't “have to”; I wasn't reviewing it—we did that, on June 23. But I'd loved author David Mura's memoir and wanted to see how he did as a novelist. And I hope to spend next weekend sifting through any or all of the following: T.C. Boyle's newly released The Women; a galley of Kate Christensen's new novel, Trouble; and a forthcoming interesting-seeming anthology of essays, Brothers, edited by Andrew Blauner, foreword by Frank McCourt.
I suppose that in some businesses, that would be considered a “working weekend.” But this is publishing; this is our life. Sure, we may be extreme readers compared to the “average” American, but even—or especially—in these challenging times, we have to keep doing what we do. We may need to change the format or the frequency or the style of what we publish, but people will not stop publishing or reading, no matter what. We have to keep finding new ways to reach the thousands of people who feel the same way we do. Book people are book people are book people, after all—and no amount of recession or depression or worry will ever change that fact.
Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson
